Unlike most of the dull grey moons in the Solar System, Hyperion's color
is a rosy tan, as this view shows.
The origin of the moon's unusual hue is not known. Some
scientists suspect the color comes from falling debris from moons further
out. A similar origin has been suggested for the dark reddish material on Saturn's
moon Iapetus.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to
create this natural color view. The images were taken in visible light
with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 28, 2006 at a
distance of approximately 291,000 kilometers (181,000 miles) from
Hyperion. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
